Settling the West: Sifton and the Newcomers

Let's start with a question

What would make you leave everything you know and travel thousands of kilometres to a place you had only seen in a poster?

Between 1896 and 1914, more than two million people came to Canada. Many headed for the Prairies with a dream printed on a government poster: free land.

Why did the government want settlers?

After the CPR was finished in 1885, the government wanted the Prairies filled with farms. Farmers would:

• grow wheat to sell around the world,
• ship it on the railway, paying fares and freight,
• buy goods made in eastern Canada, like ploughs and clothes,
• make sure the West stayed Canadian, not American.

In 1896, Laurier made Clifford Sifton the Minister of the Interior, in charge of immigration until 1905. Sifton wanted farmers who would stay and work hard on difficult land.

How did Sifton attract settlers?

• Advertising: millions of pamphlets and posters in many languages, with titles like The Last Best West. Advertising showed sunny wheat fields, not -40°C winters.
• Agents in Britain, the United States and Europe, sometimes paid for each settler they sent.
• Exhibits at fairs and tours for reporters.
• Free land under the Dominion Lands Act: for a $10 fee, a settler could claim a 160-acre quarter section. To get ownership ("prove up") in about three years, they had to live on it, build a home and break (plough) part of the land.

It worked. In 1913 alone, more than 400,000 immigrants arrived, a yearly record that stood for more than a century, until 2021. Canada's population grew from about 5.4 million in 1901 to 7.2 million in 1911.

Who came?

• British settlers, the government's first choice, including the Barr Colonists of 1903, who founded Lloydminster on today's Alberta–Saskatchewan border.
• Americans, many of them experienced farmers, who brought money and machines.
• Ukrainians from Galicia and Bukovyna (then in Austria-Hungary). The first two, Ivan Pylypiw and Wasyl Eleniak, came in 1891; many thousands followed. Sifton valued them as hardy farmers.
• Doukhobors, a Russian religious group who refused to fight in wars. About 7,500 came in 1899, with help from the writer Leo Tolstoy and the Quakers.
• Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Hungarians, Icelanders, Jewish farmers and many others.
• Black American families, mostly from Oklahoma, about whom you will learn in the next lesson.

Not everyone was equally welcome

Immigration officials ranked newcomers in a preference list. British and American farmers were at the top. Northern and then Central and Eastern Europeans, like Ukrainians and Poles, came next. Southern Europeans were lower. Jewish, Asian, Roma and Black people were placed at the bottom.

Even "accepted" groups faced prejudice. Some English Canadians mocked Ukrainians as "Galicians" and "foreigners". When Frank Oliver replaced Sifton in 1905, he favoured British settlers more strongly. Because the Doukhobors would not swear an oath of allegiance for religious reasons, many of their homestead claims were cancelled, and from 1908 many moved to British Columbia.

Notice that the land being "given away" was not empty. It was the homeland of First Nations and Métis people.

Life on a homestead

• Shelter: the first home was often a sod house made of blocks of prairie turf, or a log cabin where there were trees.
• Work: breaking tough prairie sod with a plough and oxen or horses, planting, harvesting, hauling water, cutting firewood. Women and children did a huge share: cooking, gardening, sewing, caring for animals and nursing the sick.
• Hardships: long, cold winters, drought, hail, early frost, prairie fires, mosquitoes, isolation and homesickness. Some homesteaders gave up.
• Community: bloc settlements helped people support each other with their own churches, languages and schools. Neighbours from different backgrounds helped each other at harvest and in emergencies.

What did settlement mean for First Nations and Métis?

For First Nations, the flood of settlers came after the numbered treaties and the hard years after the bison disappeared. Many communities were confined to reserves, and an unofficial pass system tried to stop people leaving reserves without an agent's permission. Settlers moved onto land that First Nations had used for generations, while promises made in the treaties were often not kept.

For many Métis families, settlement meant losing land they had lived on. Many sold the scrip (certificates for land or money) they were given, sometimes to speculators for very little. Some lived on unused strips of Crown land by roads and became known as "road allowance people".

Meanwhile, First Nations and Métis people adapted and resisted: farming on reserves, petitioning the government, working for wages and keeping their languages and ceremonies alive.